Futurist Manifesto

The Founding and Manifesto of
Futurism

Original publication in French: Le Figaro, Paris, February 20, 1909

This English-language translation COPYRIGHT ©1973 Thames and
Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved.

Source for translation by R.W. Flint reproduced below:

Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist
Manifestos. Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall,
trans. New York: Viking Press, 1973. 19-24.

The Founding and
Manifesto of Futurism
by F. T. Marinetti

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass,
domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had
trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many
reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our
feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their
celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres
who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling
like wounded birds along the city walls.

Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside,
ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged
over falls and through gourges to the sea.

Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking
bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished
roar of automobiles.

'Let's go!' I said. 'Friends, away! Let's go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We're about to
see the Centaur's birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels! ... We must shake at the gates of life, test the
bolts and hinges. Let's go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There's nothing to match the splendor
of the sun's red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial gloom!'

We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car
like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my
stomach.

The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the
beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful
mathematics of our perishing eyes.

I cried, 'The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.'

And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped down the vast
violet living and throbbing sky.

But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom to offer our
bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at
last from the weight of our courage!

And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars
under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while
hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.

'Let's break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide,
contorted mouth of the wind! Let's give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to
replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!'

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to
bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two
equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way —
Damn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air...

0 maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I
remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse. . . When I came up — torn, filthy, and stinking —
from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!

A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the prodigy. With
patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached
shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense
and its soft upholstery of comfort.

They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was,
alive again, running on its powerful fins!

And so, faces smeared with good factory muck — plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with
celestial soot — we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the
earth:

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1 . We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt
aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A
racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car
that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the
circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of
the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a
masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate
them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back, when what we want
is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already
live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war — the world's only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of
freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

1 0. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every
opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the

multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly
fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that
devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges
that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous
steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the
hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers
chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With
it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors,
archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean
to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one
another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums:
absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows,
the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls' Day — that I grant.
That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that. . . But I don't admit
that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through
the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against
the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?. . . Admiring an old picture is the same as
pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and
creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you
emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries
of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision
by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred
to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. . . But we want
no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! ... Come on! set fire
to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! ... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old
canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your axes and
hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other
younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts — we want it to
happen!

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged
cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the
strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won't be there. . . At last they'll find us — one winter's night — in open country, beneath a sad roof
drummed by a monotonous rain. They'll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming
our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our
images.

They'll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will
hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and
admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love,
courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly,
unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting. . . Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness
because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! ... Does that amaze you?

It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl
our defiance at the stars! You have objections? — Enough! Enough! We know them... We've
understood!... Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors —
Perhaps! ... If only it were so! — But who cares? We don't want to understand! ... Woe to anyone who says
those infamous words to us again!

Lift up your heads!

Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!